Kay Bailey Hutchison says she considered running for president but ‘it wasn’t the right timing for me’

Kay Bailey Hutchison

Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison says she thought about running for president — and would have made a good president — but didn’t do it because the timing was never right.

“I’d love to have been able to, because I think I could have done the job and I think I had the experience to do the job,” she told NBC’s political director Chuck Todd in an interview that aired on MSNBC this morning. “But it wasn’t the right timing for me.”

Hutchison, who is retiring from the Senate this year, said her presidential ambitions ended when she and her husband Ray adopted their first daughter, Kathryn Bailey Hutchison, then four months old, in mid-2001.

“I had my opportunity before I had children,” the 69-year-old Dallas Republican told Todd.

She also noted that races for president a decade or more ago required far more preparation than this year’s contest, which featured short exploratory efforts from candidates such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former pizza CEO Herman Cain.

“You didn’t have the capability to just jump in and run like people did this year,” she noted.

Hutchison’s comments indicate that she contemplated running for president either in 1996, when the senior senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, sought the White House, or 2000, when Texas Gov. George W. Bush entered the race.

In both cases, Hutchison deferred her dream rather than compete against a Texas politician. After the adoption of Bailey, however, the senator decided she would no longer harbor presidential ambitions.

But even though she is retiring from the Senate, Hutchison, who lost a gubernatorial primary to Perry in 2010, declined to rule out a future run for elective office in her home state.

“I can’t even imagine ever running for office again,” she told Todd. “However, I never say never and see this (tape) played back to me.”